The real polluters of Barrio Logan

A major argument used by supporters of the controversial community plan for Barrio Logan, just across from San Diego’s downtown shipyards, is that the plan will protect families, particularly children, from the neighborhood businesses that serve the shipyards and that spew “toxic, flammable chemicals, carcinogens” and other pollutants throughout the community.

City Council President Todd Gloria, Councilman David Alvarez, who represents Barrio Logan, Dr. Martin Stein and others make exactly that argument in the ballot statement they submitted seeking voter approval of the Barrio Logan plan update on June 3. Stein, a pediatrician, says the state ranks Barrio Logan in the top 5 percent of California neighborhoods “most burdened by pollution.” He says childhood asthma requiring emergency room treatment for Barrio youngsters is triple the county average. The new plan is critical, the argument goes, because the current plan, last updated in 1978, “allows auto repair shops, metal plating factories and diesel truck traffic next to schools, playgrounds and homes.”

But there’s a problem with that argument.

An exhaustive and highly technical report prepared in 2012 by a private firm, RECON Environmental, on behalf of the city in connection with an environmental analysis of the new community plan proposal, points to a very different primary source of the carcinogens and toxic pollution. It’s not the maritime-related businesses, according to the report. The primary source is the auto and truck traffic on Interstate 5, which forms the eastern boundary of Barrio Logan.

In fact, according to the RECON analysis, the community plan update would make things even worse because, with its plans for new housing, more people would be exposed to the pollutants from I-5.

“Relative, incremental and total cancer risk impacts associated with the [1978] adopted community plan, while still significant, are considered less than those” under the proposed update, the RECON report concludes.

The update of the community plan for Barrio Logan, approved by the City Council last year, has become the most contentious community plan proposal in years. The focal point of the argument to date has been the concern of the shipyards and the related businesses that the proposal will over time put many of those businesses out of business, with negative spinoff impact on the shipyards themselves and possibly even on the Navy operations that depend on the shipyards.

Those business interests banded together last year with a successful campaign to force the council to rescind its approval of the plan or put it on the ballot. The council put it on the ballot in the form of two propositions — Proposition B, which is the plan itself, and Proposition C, the zoning changes needed to implement the plan.

Barrio Logan is a community that deserves air just as clean and safe as any other community in San Diego. But Propositions B and C are not the way to get there.